


Digital Shadow

by Grimreaperchibi



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate use of a Helmsman, Body Horror, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2017-12-29 01:28:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/999257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grimreaperchibi/pseuds/Grimreaperchibi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was never about changing the status quo, being a defender of the voiceless, or trying to send a message to the assholes in power.  Revolution wasn't the game being played.  It was actually much simpler than all that:  Karkat wanted back what was his.  And if the Empire had to burn for that to happen, then so be it.  (<i>City of Night</i> expansion/companion fic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [City of Night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/798648) by [Grimreaperchibi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grimreaperchibi/pseuds/Grimreaperchibi). 



> Once more, titled and inspired by [this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PG0rRPAOnc) from Miracle of Sound. The playlist can be found [here](http://grimreaperchibi.tumblr.com/post/66167105265/digital-shadow-playlist).

As the sun fell on the eighth day, the question Karkat Vantas had asked himself every night previous changed slightly.  _When is he returning_ became w _ill he return?_   Despite the fact that with each successive night thereafter, the answer became a more emphatic no, his father would not be coming back, Karkat continued to sit at the window of the obscenely large bedroom he’d claimed/been given and watch.  He waited there for an eventuality that he came to understand would never happen until the evening the question became _why was he the only one waiting?_

Finding his brother in their new home wasn’t all that hard, even though the place was huge for three (now five) people and twisted up because there was no honest floor plan to speak of.  Their saviors, the Makara family, was the definition of eccentric, something their living space reflected.  When one room became filled with their eclectic junk, they simply built another room somewhere else, a habit that had been going on for generations now.  Considering his friendship with the youngest (and possibly sanest—a truly terrifying thought) heir to the household, Karkat understood enough of the lunacy to successfully navigate the meandering, claustrophobic corridors.  As to where the last of his own family might be, well, where else would a know-it-all hole up except in a library?

It was an old library, too.  Not just because of the thick dust draped across every surface it could cling to, but because it contained actual books.  Hundreds upon probable thousands of the paper and ink information storage units filled shelves that went from floor to a second story ceiling, the uniformity of their illegible spines broken up by various bric-a-brak, mostly the molding, stuffed skins of deceased animals and skulls that had long since stopped grinning.  Karkat could feel his skin itching as he picked his way through the dead menagerie and piled up furniture towards the one lighted area somewhere in the middle of the mess. 

His brother did not disappoint.  Kankri had indeed installed himself as a feature of the room.  He was currently reclining on an unattractive couch made comfortable with some truly gaudy pillows.  If that wasn’t pretentious enough, he also had his nose stuck into one of the aforementioned books.  There were several stacks close at hand, as well, the dusty to-be-reads and the clean have-been-reads.  The size of the clean pile alone answered the question of how long the elder brother had been at his task.

Resentment swept through Karkat, hot and bitter.  He didn’t expect much emotion out of his older brother, but this…this was beyond not caring.  “Seriously?” he demanded, resisting the temptation to kick the nearest stack over.  “We got chased out of our house by Government drones, watched everyone we love get picked off by said drones, lost everything that belonged to us, including our freedom, and this is how you want to spend your energy?  By pretending it’s story time?”

“These are not simply stories, Kitkit,” Kankri replied evenly, his voice as infuriatingly gray as the dust surrounding them.  “They’re—”

“Don’t call me that,” Karkat bit back.  “And don’t fucking put me off, either.”

The response was automatic.  “Watch your language—you’re a guest.”

“Right.  Because a household that crams the legal limit of motherfuck variations into a single sentence is going to be offended that I used half the word.  Sure, let’s go with that.”

“There’s no need for that tone—”

“Then put the goddamn book down and talk to me!”

Kankri marked his spot with extreme care and a sigh of long patience before setting the tome aside.  He sat up, straight and attentive, and met one violently red gaze with his own.  “What do you wish me to say, hm?” he asked, neither patronizing nor particularly aggrieved.  “Do I feel bad for the Captors?  Yes.  They were good people who deserved more than they received.  Did Dad do the right thing by trying to go back and help?  Only his conscience can answer that.”

“But you never expected him to come back.”  It was exactly the accusation it sounded like.

“…No,” the other admitted, slow to actually say the word.  “We always figured that if the initial run was unsuccessful, those left behind would…not be returning.”

“What we?”  Karkat’s eyes narrowed as his anger surged again.  “There were plans?”

“Of course there were plans.”  Now there was condescension in Kankri’s voice.  “One does not simply aid and abet, let alone facilitate, unregistered psionics without acknowledging that discovery is a matter of time, not coincidence or happenstance—especially when young ones become involved.  As for the we, what did you think Dad, I, and Uathan talked about while you were off terrorizing Mituna and Sollux?”

This was the second time Karkat had heard that term, _psionic_ , in conjuncture with what had happened, though he was no closer to understanding its significance.  The lack of knowledge scraped at him even as the description of his friendship with the children of his father’s friend made him flinch.  He wasn’t an easy person to get along with, he knew that, but certainly it wasn’t _that_ bad.  Or was that exactly why they hadn’t ever told him?  Because he was nuisance to be put up with rather than a friend who could be trusted?  There only seemed to be lies everywhere anyway, stacked one on top of another until it was hard to tell where each started or ended.  Maybe it was all a lie, considering no one had seen fit to trust him with the information that could still kill him despite his ignorance.

“Karkat, I assure you that whatever you’re thinking, it isn’t true,” his brother tried to reason.  “We were simply—”

“Don’t.”  The words came out through gritted teeth.  “Don’t you dare justify this to me.”

With a small nod, Kankri acquiesced.  “In any case, it doesn’t do any good to worry about the past,” he continued.  “This is our lives now, Kitkit.  We’re outcasts and we were lucky to be taken in by anyone, let alone a family like the Makara’s.  We need to concentrate on building our lives here, not what-ifs and unchangeable facts.”

A long silence followed Karkat’s pointed look around the forgotten room filled with archaic media, esoteric information, and crumbling shades of death.  Then he turned away without a word.  Kankri said nothing to stop him from leaving.

***

It took several minutes of forceful, steady breathing before Karkat could unclench his hands enough to pull out his phone, one of the last things he actually owned, so that he could try to get a hold of the last person he felt he could trust. 

**\--carcinoGeneticist [CG] started trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]--**

**CG:**   I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.

The response was alarmingly immediate. 

**TC:**   YoU kNoW tHiS mOtHeRfUcKeR iS aLwAyS dOwN fOr SoMe JaMmInG wItH hIs BeSt BrOtHeR.   
**TC:**   WhAt Is Up?

**CG:**   I MEAN FACE TO FACE, ASSHOLE.  WHERE ARE YOU?

**TC:**   WhErEvEr I aM mOtHeRfUcKiNg MeAnT tO bE.

To anyone else, that might have at best been a non-answer, at worst, a brush-off.  To Karkat, it eased some of the tension restricting his breathing.  He followed his convoluted path back to the room he’d started in and sure enough, there was the youngest Makara , the gentle and sometimes aggravatingly calm giant known as Gamzee, tossing blankets and kicking pillows into what the other called a feeling pile.  Karkat poked at said pile to make sure nothing stupid had been added before he tentatively sat down.  Considering Gamzee constructed the things out of whatever was close at hand, anything and everything could be in there regardless of suitability. Gamzee flopped in moments later like all the bones in his body had abruptly dissolved.  The position didn’t look the least but comfortable for someone with limbs as long as his, but he simply laid where he fell, waiting out Karkat’s natural resistance with (probably drug enhanced) patience. Karkat remained quiet as he let his thoughts race about the people he thought he’d known. 

Uathan Captor and Duirik Vantas had been brothers in all but lineage, so it made a fair amount of sense that their children would also become friends.  Time and presence had more to do with actually becoming friends than much else—one family had visited the other at least once a week.  Kankri didn’t get along well with anyone, but Karkat had found the older Mituna to be amusingly annoying while the younger Sollux became the kind of friendly rival all young children look for unknowingly.  So while the older brother insisted upon staying with the adults, the Captor children would play with youngest Vantas, helping an otherwise shy and prickly child eventually make other friends as well.  He remembered petty squabbles and mud fights, marathon gaming session and pillow fort sleepovers.  Teasing Mituna about kissing his girlfriend and being teased by Sollux for his spaghetti-factory coding.  Falling asleep during his father’s stories and the subtle comfort of seeing his father fast asleep against Uathan, finally finding the rest that seemed to escape the man more nights than not.

It had been another quiet afternoon the day the Government came, breaking the comfortable monotony that was life being lived.  Solid, steady Uathan had stormed into their home, breathless and panicked, alternately arguing with his children and Duirik about what was happening.  Karkat had been upstairs when the noise started and had had only the time to notice the strong smell of ozone, a scent that went hand in hand with an upset Captor, before the electricity cut out.   Turning words into action, his father had deftly swept all the children out the back door and forced them to run, never looking back even when something exploded and someone screamed.  They ran and ran as night fell, stopping only once to argue about where they were going.  Since both Mituna and Karkat had friends within the exceptionally powerful Makara family, they were directed to go there while Duirik returned to the house to find Uathan.

Government drones caught up to them halfway to their destination.  Mituna had peeled off to cover their continued escape, but it still hadn’t been enough to shake the tail they now had.  Literally steps from the all clear, Sollux had followed his brother’s example.  “ _They have to capture psions alive,_ ” he had said, already surrounded by the crack of red and blue lightning.  “ _The children of a dissident will just get killed._ ”  Then Kankri had thrown him into the house where Gamzee had held him back, stopping him from rushing into a fight that was honestly over before it began.

That was the first instance Karkat had ever heard the term, as well as the last time he’d seen Sollux; a limp body carried away by the armoured drones.  It was the last time he’d seen any of them, the whole of his world gone in a single evening’s heat glare and decaying light.

“They lied to me.”  A hysterical giggle bubbled up as the truth of the statement sunk in.  Karkat buried his face in his hands.  “My entire life’s a fucking lie.”

“Best lies don’t change truths, bro; just make them look a little motherfucking different.”  Gamzee shifted closer, letting his cool fingers wander up and down Karkat’s back in an attempt to be soothing.  “Ain’t no lie that motherfucker hiding all up in the past loves you.  Also ain’t no lie you’re important to all them motherfuckers that up and left you here.  You wouldn’t motherfucking _be_ here if they didn’t.”

Karkat wanted to argue with that, but couldn’t figure out how.  If anyone had done anything different, then no, he probably wouldn’t have been sitting there.  There was little consolation in the thought.  In fact it made him feel worse.  If he’d known what was happening, he could have done more to help, even though it would have almost certainly ended much worse off for him.  And it pissed him off that he hadn’t even been given the chance to try and make some sort of difference, expected to just follow along and be okay with that.  All because they had to take psions alive while the children of a dissident would simply be killed.

Why?  The question battered Karkat’s brain, twisting into the rest of his anger, hurt, and confusion.  Or maybe it was the other way around, a cause instead of a symptom.  Why?  Why take such pains to save one?  To hide one?  To lie about it?  It all spiraled back to the same point—what the actual fuck was a psionic?

“Don’t know, bro,” Gamzee said, leisurely stretching.  “Bet a month’s worth of motherfucking Faygo it’s got something to do with that miracle of a light show your Captor boy put on.”

Karkat began chewing on a nail, unsure if he was trying to stop the idea growing in his brain or flesh it out further.  With so many other questions hanging like swords above his head, the only one that really mattered was _what did he have left to lose?_   He was sixteen years old and dead in all ways except actually missing a pulse.  He’d waited, but his life hadn’t come back.  Obviously his brother was already quite settled into his new lot and unwilling to seek more.  Even if it was time to start going forward again, there was nothing that said Karkat had to do it passively—only quietly.

“Gamzee…”  He didn’t know how to ask for what he needed.  All he owned was a phone that only worked on the Makara household network, the clothes he’d worn when he’d been forced to run, and a necklace that had once belonged to his mother.  Shelter was all Sanctuary Law required an amnesty-granting family to provide and he needed so much more than that if he was going to follow through with this insane little project.

“S’all good,” the other drawled as he hauled himself to his feet.  “You know what’s mine is yours.  Ain’t like we don’t got spares in motherfucking fours or fives ‘round here anyway.  If shit goes missing, ain’t no one’s fault except the motherfucker who left it behind.”

Somehow Karkat doubted the rest of his friend’s family would see it that way, but the sentiment behind it made him smile a little.  He’d just been given carte blanche to find and use whatever he needed.  The floundering feeling that had enveloped him since the start of this mess eased; he was still in way over his head, but at least his feet were now touching something solid.  He could work with this.  He wasn’t alone and there was still someone he could trust.  It wasn’t a lot, but as far as new beginnings went, it could have been much worse.

“Thanks,” he said quietly, knowing that was a poor way to actually express what he was feeling.

The gratitude was shrugged off.  Gamzee placed a hand on Karkat’s head instead, lightly ruffling his hair.  “The trick is to keep breathing, bro.  Miracles come to those motherfuckers who can keep breathing long enough to see them,” he said before wandering back to the obscurity he’d come from, clearly considering the conversation over.  Karkat remained in the pile for a while longer, ignoring the urge to cry and only partially succeeding.  He could have been mourning the past or simply felt overwhelmed as the tears slipped down his cheeks.  They were certainly a little frustrated when he found a computer module hidden in the mess of blankets when the pile was cleaned up and maybe even the happy kind when he attached it to the window and watched the holographic display pop up on the glass, discovering it hadn’t even been calibrated for use yet.

Karkat Vantas didn’t believe in miracles much anymore—he’d been through too much recently to give that bullshit any credence.  But breathing…breathing was something he could do.  And on the twenty-third day, one breath at a time, he vowed to somehow piece his life back together.

***


	2. Chapter 2

More than anything else, it’s the pain that makes it hard to concentrate on what you’re doing.  Whether you’re in the machine or not, everything _hurts_ , but that edge always seems a bit…more…when you’re in, probably because of the extra current your natural wiring is being forced to take on.  Exhaustion helps dull the pain some, but you can still feel exactly where each neuro-electrical port has been carefully grafted into your nervous system.  They throb in time with your heartbeat, sharp as opposed to the perpetual dull ache of the biological wire now actively growing along the rest of your nerves.  You almost can’t remember a time when there wasn’t pain.  And that’s how they eventually win.  In the end, it’s not having your organs replaced with synthetic gears, or your veins being filled with artificial supplements, or even the biowire crawling under the skin that eventually makes you a part of the machine they’ve built to make you “useful.”  It’s running away into the Dark.  It’s giving up on physicality to finally rid yourself of the unending pain and forgetting that there was once something else to you.  That’s what leaves you as nothing more than a component of the Empire’s vast system. 

The voices don’t help much either, sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, but always in a gibberish you’re starting to understand, or maybe you’d just forgotten you had understood once.  But it’s one voice in particular that makes you push through the haze.  They’ve drugged him again, calming you brother’s raving for a few hours, so the screaming has turned into mumbles barely audible over all the other voices you’ve been hearing since they first started the testing.  They’ve given you a dose of the mind honey, too, a much smaller one.  You can feel it ooze through your body, coating raw nerves in sweetness so that they will bend instead of break when the power rush starts seconds later.  You feel torn, unraveled like cloth, and you have to consciously remind yourself to breathe through this part, to relax or risk the madness that afflicts your brother.  It feels oddly like you’re falling, and in some sense you are.  The reality is more like the entire world is expanding out around you in every direction at once.  And when that stops, there’s this sense of unlimited space that means you’ve synced, which means it’s time to get to work. 

Because you remember still.  Despite everything that’s happened to you now, you remember how your brother fought to keep them from separating the two of you.  You remember your father, an apology in his every word, telling you both exactly what was going to happen next as you were all shipped to the facility because he could do nothing more to save his children.  The memory that truly keeps you grounded, fighting no matter how the pain makes you wish you could just give up being _you_ , is that of your best friend screaming your name as the drones shrugged off your attempt at offence and swatted you down like you were nothing more than an annoying insect.  Because of him, you believe in your memories, that you once had a name and family, and maybe even something of a choice in life. 

And that’s what this is:  a choice.  One way or another, they are going to use you, so you’re going to use them in turn.  You don’t fight them or their tests because you need the connection to the net—something their arrogance says is impossible for you to do yet and you’re not inclined to disillusion them.  They’re being so careful with you that they don’t realize you’ve already overtaken their system.

It’s why you know your brother’s sync rate is dismal and the injections of mind honey they give to calm him are already twice the highest suggested dosage and still climbing.  You have medical records showing the strain is starting to kill him, even though you can _feel_ how his power spikes, then drops, never evening out and how the extremes are becoming more dramatic over time.  The projected rate can’t decide if he’ll die of organ failure first or burnout, only that he will die, and sooner than later.  So even though you’re exhausted and still slowly breaking under the pain, you work relentlessly at your shadow program, creating code in your head when you’re out and implementing it when you’re in.  All the information you can get your electronic fingers on gets loaded into it before sheer desperation has you releasing it into the network, set search for that distinctive signature you can only hope still exists.

You know you pushed too far because there’s blood everywhere when they pull you back out, woozy and disoriented.  The voices of all those bound to the system still whisper in your ears even though you’re no longer plugged into it.  Your brother’s crying now, hopelessly high and becoming even more lost under the grip of the drugs they keep feeding him.  When your eyes close later, sedated and monitored in a medical bay rather than your usual holding cell, you find yourself praying for the first time ever that your best friend is still the stubborn, surly crab you remember him to be.

***

Karkat sighed as he turned off the shower.  The hot water might have been limitless, but all the good it was going to do for him had already run out.  He eased across the stone floor, grateful the shower itself was a walk-in type because he honestly didn’t know if he could have stepped into a basin type, let alone back out again.  It’s also why he hadn’t gone for the soaking tub—once he sat down, he was going to be sitting there for a while and he still had other shit to do tonight.

“Lights!” he snarled, finally tired of fumbling for a towel in the otherwise blissful dark.  He flinched as the fluorescents flipped on and swore, though if it was for the sharp light he suddenly found himself staring directly into or his ribs once more protesting their abuse, even Karkat couldn’t decide.  The now found towel passed over his skin in a pantomime at drying before he stepped up to the mirror to inspect the damage.

As ever, his own red eyes caught his attention first, an intense crimson colour that often had others accusing him of genetic mod-hopping.  He’d long since given up trying to correct people even though they were as natural as the teeth in his mouth and the nails on his hands.  His father had called the colour passionate.  Gamzee called it miraculous, which meant less than nothing considering how often that word got used as a descriptor.  Karkat knew the best label was heretical, but kept it to himself.  Then he could see past his own gaze to the partial black eye collecting at the inside of his right eye, bleed-over from the slightly swollen and discoloured mess that was the bridge of his nose.  Some prodding revealed it wasn’t broken, even if it did start to drip blood again.  The split on his lip stung when he licked it absently.  The usual assortment of scrapes and bruises decorated his hands and arms.  Several were still forming on his torso, including where he’d taken a direct swing from that deuce to the ribs.  His shins and knees were practically black.

…he’d actually gotten off light despite how he felt.  Did that mean he was actually getting better, or had Gamzee finally taken pity on his pathetic ass during these rounds of “training” and stopped early?

That was what his friend called dragging him out of the rooms he’d claimed so that they could beat the hell out of each other for a couple of hours—training.  Well, Gamzee still did most of the beating while Karkat did mostly running and getting beaten.  At first, he’d though the last person he trusted had finally gone off the deep end.  No one in the Makara line was quite sane to begin with, so really, it had only been a matter of time before the youngest also submitted to enlightened madness.  He’d been chased through practically every room the place had before being cornered in what looked like a museum for ancient weaponry.  Out of breath, out of pleas, and out of his mind with fear and self-reproach because this was the _second time_ he was about to lose everything though ignorance, Karkat had grabbed at whatever he could lay his hands on and swung it in self-defense.  He’d whiffed it bad, not coming even remotely close to a meaningful strike, but Gamzee had stopped all the same, giving him a look at was equal parts, “well learned, good student” and “I can’t believe it took you that long to figure it out.”  (It actually took a half dozen of those little run-ins to figure out the whole point was to take a stand for himself.)

Backwards and brutal as it seemed, it was exactly the kind of encouragement he needed to makes sure he didn’t let himself languish in exile like a certain someone who was to remain nameless seemed contented to do.  Now that he understood, he wanted to fight back, to hide better, move faster and maybe someday payback the bruises.  It was therapeutic, playing psychotic murderer and unwilling victim number four throughout the massive, convoluted manor, because nothing else could matter except getting away.  The whole affair was exhausting and nerve-racking, but it also ensured he spent at least some time sleeping instead of letting his brain drive him to insomnia with coding problems and data analysis.  It became part of the normalcy for his life in the here-after.

A traitorous part of Karkat still longed for the old normal.  Falling asleep to his father’s voice as he wove some story together.  The romance collection he had stashed under his bed because he didn’t want to deal with the harassment leaving them on the shelf would have invited.  The whining arguments about cleaning because it was only the Captors coming over and they didn’t count as company anymore since they were over all the time anyway.  Twenty hour gaming marathons and four AM calls to apologize (yet again) for some stupid argument or careless remark.  Asking if they were still friends because while the answer, _“Yes, KK, we’re still friends,”_ never changed, Karkat had always been afraid it would be different this latest time around.

Friends…  After everything, did he really get to call Sollux and his brother Mituna friends?

He caught his reflection’s gaze again.  “If he’s not your friend,” he said aloud, “then why the fuck are you still looking for him?”  As always, the mirror did not give him an adequate answer, prompting Karkat to sigh again and turn away.

After the heat of the bathroom, the coolness of the bedroom felt good, leaving little prickles across his still damp skin.  A quick search of the clothing pile produced a pair of pants and a shirt he wasn’t absolutely lost in.  He wasn’t a slouch in the body department, respectably tall and heavy for his age of nearly seventeen, but next to Gamzee, everyone was a runt.  Sanctuary Law may have made him persona non grata and left him living on the scraps of his hosts, but Makara scraps where still better than out-of-the-package new in the ways that mattered to Karkat now.  Besides, it wasn’t like he had anyone in the material world to impress anymore.

With a low groan, he sank into the room’s bed, shifting this way and that until his ribs stopped protesting so much.  Some careful feeling around the bedcovers revealed his net goggles and gloves.  The gloves were pretty standard, a series of sensor pads that were fitted to his fingertips, then connected via cable to the translating unit that wrapped around his wrist, the three-pad professional programmer type rather than the five-pad civilian model.  The goggles, however, were the real treat.  Completely wireless with streamlined audio input/output and adaptive visual modeling, they had the same weight and presence as a set of glasses and could be switched to such a function easily.  The user could even ghost whatever his virtual dealings were onto the real world, allowing him to manipulate data in real space-time.  The system was completely immersive, leaving the difference between physical reality and net reality down to a few fluidity issues and physics.

As always, a mostly ignored feeling of revulsion rolled through Karkat as he connected first to his private system to gather his toys before engaging the virtual network that would mask his origin point when he started the rest of his dive, turning his hosts into just another set of victims.  He’d purposefully left the home screen as a rendering of a stylized spiked skull overlaid with a snippet of Government propaganda about psionics.  Though it was doubtful he’d ever forget the truth, or even stop feeling like slime whenever he logged in, he never wanted to become complacent again.  So he stared hard at Sollux’s hacker sign and the phrase “For the Honour and the Glory” while his goggles and gloves calibrated to his relative body position, then tore through the image as he connected to the household network.

With the ease of much practice, he jumped the firewall that was suppose to keep individual households separated from the area network and began selecting his unwitting helpers.  The bots and their siphoning protocols were attached at random to other area users.  Some would stay at the area level while most others would drop further into other networks the user they were ghosting as had access to.  Many would continue to replicate out from there, creating a vast, shielding net around him and his activities while providing him admittance to those networks as well.  The more time they were given to spread out and entrench, the more secure Karkat became, so he took his time to precisely attune himself to Gamzee’s electronic signal back in the home network.  Several layers of failsafes were engaged to protect against the usual assortment of internet gunk, including an auto-tether that would pull him instantly back to his private system if needed, before armouring himself in the greatest piece of code he’d ever written.  When a system scanned it, the subroutine was subtly altered to make the program believe there was nothing there to scan and move on.  It could fool even a decently intelligent A.I., which was good, because he planned on going as deep as he could that night.

Down through the area network to the city with more toys, defenses, offences, and replicators.  Karkat tried to be patient with the process.  Having done it so many times made it easy to think things should be moving faster than they were, and being overly eager was a one way ticket to failure.  Diversify, engage, obfuscate—he became a intern lawyer looking up a technicality, a doctor on a conference call, a code junkie selling hacks, a janitor watching porn while he waited for one of his service bots to break, a kid getting his ass kicked in a virtual arcade game and the kid kicking said ass.  The information scrolled by as his bots continued their random replication, the counter keeping track of their growth steadily climbing, waiting for one to connect to the right combination of clearance and access.  In the meantime, he played some game that apparently amused his friend so that his presence wasn’t stagnant.  He finished out two more rounds even after he had the connection he was looking for before switching himself in for the bot.

The position was worth the wait.  A quick system check revealed he was now one Gideonna Kinzie, high-end script monkey of a front company for the Government who apparently didn’t think much about her current project.  It wasn’t locked down at all, leaving a clear path for Karkat to ghost into her signal, set a few defenses with some nasty trigger-effects, and launch himself into the Government networks.  He continued down as quickly as he could.  The upper layers were almost all propaganda or honeynets, under which were some of the more superfluous and mundane governmental processes and not much else.  He’d picked them clean months ago, during his initial quest to figure out what the hell a psionic was and why such a thing had torn apart his world.

The term described people who could manipulate things with the power of their minds.  The list of manifestations went on for miles, but the important part was that their brains were fundamentally different in structure and performance than most other people.  It was a quiet practice, but the Government did actively, aggressively recruit such people for what they called “Special Service,” almost from the cradle up.  Those children were treated to an advanced education.  Remaining family members received a stipend from the Government for their cooperation.  They almost wanted for nothing until the age of fifteen and were told the entire time that the single greatest thing they could do with their life was to serve, not just the Government, but the Empire itself, hailed forever after as heroes for their sacrifice.  _“For the Honour and the Glory.”_

The Captors had been such people, all three of them, and somehow, they had known the lie for what it was.  They had managed to smother their powers so that they could pass as normal citizenry because “Special Service” really meant being turned into a piece of wetware for a machine.  A machine whose sole purpose was to keep the body alive enough that those wondrous mental powers could be focused into maintain the Empire’s network, which in turn supported the Government networks, all the way up to the crappiest home-made terminal.  If it was done online, then it was done with the power of a thousand (if not hundreds of thousands) of psions behind it.

Though he was a much better hacker now than he had been then, Karkat had never managed to get a hold of any specifics on the process.  The closest he’d ever gotten to the actual project were hazy pictures of burnout victims and unchecked biowire growth.  He’d tried to heave his toes into the toilet at that point and remained sick for weeks after at just the memory.  He also stopped caring about the why or the how of it all.  All he cared about once he could stand to be on the net again was finding some trace of the person who had once been his friend.  If brainwaves could be uploaded and synced in order create an A.I. capable of rational thought, and these psionics were basically having their brains become the mother of all circuit boards, then there should be something left behind of them that could be found in said network.  It was stupid, and dangerous, and there was nothing he could do with the information even if he had it, but he needed to find it more than he needed sleep or food.  He had nothing but time to kill anyway; why not spend it seeking what little closure he was ever likely to get?

A twitch of a finger brought his nothing there program to active status while the curl of his other hand brought him out of his ghosting.  The decent slowed as he neared the border of what was Government and that which was Empire.  The view from his goggles changed.  Instead of endless lines of code running before his eyes, Karkat engaged the adaptive modeling, making the code something virtually tangible and therefore easier to directly manipulate.  Countless dots of light, red, yellow, orange, blue, filled his vision, stark and tiny against the otherwise vast, empty darkness.  Some were clustered more closely together than others, but they were all connected to each other with silvery lines that ranged in thickness from twice his own height to so thin it almost couldn’t be seen.  It reminded Karkat of the onetime his father had taken the family out of the city to show him and his brother what real stars looked like.  Away from the light and air pollution, the night had filled with a completely different type of luminescence, leaving him awed and feeling small.

He still felt that way, looking down at the display.  An image copy was saved to his files to be compared to others taken from other entry points, an inane attempt to map out the massive network that sustained the Empire.  But information was information and he’d learned to keep all of it, no matter how unimportant it seemed at the time.  This particular run had dumped him in a place he’d never seen before—he should have paid better attention to the access that got him this far.  He could back track his logs later, though.  Right now, he needed to focus on not getting fried by net security as he entered the ocean of lights, looking for thin connections where a blip in functionality would draw the least amount of attention.

For a while, Karkat remained pretty diligent in his mission of picking targets, interfacing with them long enough to copy a decent amount of information, then moving on to the next random sample.  But then his muscles started to stiffen and ache.  Physical exhaustion coupled with the repetition inherent in his task left him simply floating among the false stars more frequently than was safe.  The data he was collecting included nothing more interesting than inventory reports and some inner office memos about budget concerns.  It was time to wrap this adventure up.

Glancing around, trying to find a couple more suitable points before calling it quits, he noticed an odd cluster still a bit further below him where he could have sworn there had been none before.  They were connected weirdly, too, not to each other despite the proximity, and only faintly to the next nearest.  Karkat dropped a bit further, startled when he fell out of the main swath of lights, like there was a density issue keeping the two groups separated.  A cold sweat broke out on his skin as the endless dark pressed up just beyond the funny little lights that had drawn him this far.  Weren’t there supposed to be some sort of fish that waved a light around to attract prey just like he was being attracted now?  Karkat gave himself a firm mental slap.  This was just an illusion.  There were no lights, no darkness, and nothing monstrous was waiting just outside the realm of either.  All that existed was an endless array of ones and zeros coalescing into something more meaningful to the average user.

In stark defiance of his earlier trepidation, Karkat reached for one of the unusual lights.  The interface proved these were new systems, barely uploaded and empty save for some standard processing protocols.  New slaves being added to some overtaxed system elsewhere, no doubt.  Feeling giddy on adrenaline and exhaustion, he decided to make a bad choice by slapping his own hacker mark on one.  It was as unlikely that anyone would ever see it as it was likely that security would triple once it was found, but Karkat didn’t care at the moment.  Seeing the digital gash dripping stylized blood on an Empire system was cathartic.  He was alive and he would not be erased.  He would haunt them as a vengeful ghost until the day the whole Empire fell.

Satisfied, he began ascending just as carefully as he had descended.  And because he was being careful, he knew something had attached to him long before any of his warnings ever sounded on the matter.  It wasn’t malicious (yet), so despite the annoyance that this thing had somehow glomped onto his nothing there program, Karkat didn’t actually bother with it until he was free of the Government networks.  Then he found two bots close together and ghosted himself into one while applying his armour to the other.  What the hell was it with imagers and turning viruses into insects?  Unless you collected them or lived in the boondocks, the only insects most people knew were mosquitoes and flies.  Even he had to do an image search to find out the thing was supposed to be some sort of bee.  A tough sell, considering it was missing pieces and glitching like crazy, more pixel than bug.  Karkat switched back to the scrolling code.

…it was definitely a virus, but a half-assed one at best.  Most of the program was scrambled, trailing syntax and open functions like banners to stupidity.  He’d made better as a script kiddie finally allowed area access.  The only part that was functional was the hook, which had embedded itself well into his program.  The easy part was finding it.  The hard part was figuring out how it got there in the first place so that he could extract it.  The modification was a single line buried in the code meant to rewrite the opposing program, which was nothing less than a slap in the face, really.  Why the hell was something like this been floating around in the first place, let alone in the Empire’s network?  Had it been part of something larger that had been only partially eaten by a security protocol before it was declared dead?  Its very existence irritated Karkat, regardless of how it had come to be.  Tired and in a moderate amount of pain, he didn’t really want to fight to free his program.  Especially not when he had a clean backup copy on his private system he could clone from.  So he took an image of the problematic source code to struggle with later and began stripping the infected program of its functionality. 

He intended to turn it into an empty shell around the virus piece, then abandon it to the scrubbers that cleaned up errant bits of free-floating code in the area network.  What happened was that everything was fine until he started removing his hacker ID, just in case the scrubbers didn’t fully chew their food either.  With the first set of deletions, the virus exploded, for lack of better phrasing.  Light seared into Karkat’s eyes even after he instinctively closed them.  Sound poured into his ears, loud enough to echo though his skull.  The goggles were ripped from his face and sent flying across the room.  The light and the sound remained.  Blind, deaf, and panicked, Karkat flailed, fell off the bed, and hit the floor hard.  He did not get back up.

***

**Author's Note:**

> Want more writing/music/bad fangirl antics? I've got a semi-NSFW [tumblr](http://grimreaperchibi.tumblr.com) where all the weirdness gets dumped.


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